Neat Things from COMDEX 1987

On a fabulous Computer Chronicles, Stewart and crew visited the COMDEX computer dealers’ conference in Las Vegas, in 1987.

There were several notable announcements:

• the much anticipated release date for OS/2
• Chips & Technologies rep talks about the difficulty in reverse-engineering the PS/2 BIOS
• AST added bus mastering to the ISA bus and called it SMARTslot—who needs Microchannel?
• Western Digital is doing a PS/2 clone
• plug-in upgrade cards that turn your 8088 into an 80386
• color printer… speed of only 1 to 2 minutes per page! (my Dell color laser prints color pages at 24 pages per minute)
• A new wireless networking product (in 1987!)  Only $2000 per client!

 

Interesting that the Chips & Technologies guy assumed that the entire industry would move to PS/2 clones; he estimated three years.  Of course, what ended up happening was the PS/2 architecture dying off after several years, and the clone makers (with Intel and Microsoft’s assistance) made their own industry standards by continuing to extend the PC AT BIOS and by creating EISA and later PCI.

 

Enjoy (9:29)!

COMDEX 1987

 

full episode:

https://archive.org/details/comdex_2